I would say Visual Novels are the medium closest to Games, and suffer just as much when they are adapted. Though they're a medium barely seen out of Japan, and most seem to write them off as just games without gameplay rather than their own medium. Other than that, pretty much non-disagreeable. Games and books don't have stopping points, just places were the reader/gamer stops voluntarily. Would only really convert into Visual Novels, books and Graphic Novels. The latter even has the same problems generally with forgoing story for action.

Take the Mario bros. movie, the undoubtably bad movie that even miamoto regrets giving the rights to it. Our perceptions are altered by how we are immersed into something, as such, a novel will be much different than a short story. A game has a shorter story than a movie. Attempting to force it will lead to them saying that luigi and Mario have Mario as a last name. They each fit to where they belong. Though I will be honest to say the prince of Persia movie wasn't that bad.

I really wish we could one day see a video game movie that fails merely because of the problems inherent in adapting an interactive story to non-interactive film, rather than due to the fact that the film makers slapped the title of a video game onto a formulaic, badly-written story that has little to nothing to do with the game in question.

The truth is that it's difficult to judge the feasibility of adapting a video game into a movie because nobody's actually attempted it.

Unfortunately, it seems that most video games just don't have a strong enough plot or characters that can stand on their own without the gameplay. Obviously there are exceptions, but those aren't the games getting turned into movies. Plus, most games-turned-movies tend to be half-assed, and that never makes for a good movie.

A little off topic here, but in regards to removing part of the LOTR's ending, I don't feel it was an improvement as much as it was the right choice for that version. A book can take more time with its ending than a movie can, and god knows the movie was already dragging on by the time it finished, and that was without the extra stuff in the Shire.

Well, they don't ALL suck. Exceptions to the rule are a constant, however confusing that may sound when you really think about it. The thing is...it's not necessarily just because of what you're doing to the story or if you don't have enough to work with. There lies a way to sift through the canon and tell the story that mainly stays, made easier if there's a sequel that defines one of your many endings as the canon ending. THE PROBLEM is Executive Meddling, lousy stupid PC bullshit, and just general mishandling.

Basically, the higher-ups will decide to tamper with it, and the direct can't say no (mostly), because it's his paycheck talking. That isn't the fault of the game. Then, there's the issue of what people are afraid to do with a movie that (Oh gods!) crosses the invisible PC line were they think an unruly mob with torches and pitchforks will descend upon them. That idiocy isn't the game's fault. And finally, there's directors with creative differences who, in their wisdom, just fuck things up. That kind of nuttery...is not the game's fault.

The story is there. You just have to cut through all the crap. And that is why SOME game-to-movie adaptations have been acceptable.

I think the biggest reason why game based movies suck is because the movie studios that make'em don't care about the source material as much as they do with the expected revenue they hope to make off opening day.

I think Yahtzee has scored a solid hit on the issue, but there are other elements I'd consider.

We take different things for granted in movies and in video games. We take things for granted in each, certainly; each has certain tropes that we give a nod to and move on. A few examples:

If a character in a movie visited the same store eight or nine times, chatting with the amiable shopkeep each time, you, the viewer, would probably assume that that location and/or merchant would turn out to have some greater significance later in the movie. You would expect a shoot-out to turn the order and seeming domestic bliss of that store into a warzone, or you would expect the shopkeeper to offer a shoulder to cry on and some folksy, perfect advice at some turning point in the movie, or that the troubled missing ten-year-old would run to that store when they felt they had no place else to go.

In a video game, you probably kept visiting that shop (and hearing the same canned quip over and over) because it was necessary to get the gear to progress and served the designers as a beat to offset the action in the rest of the game.

Similarly, if someone kills an innocent bystander in a movie, it would be a huge turning point. You could expect them to spend the rest of the film wracked with guilt, or that it would reveal the character we thought to be benevolent to be far more sinister than they first appeared. Whereas if someone kills an innocent bystander in a video game, it's as likely as not a failure to align the aiming reticule correctly, or some sloppiness (intentional or not) on the part of the team-mate AI. You might give some zenny to the beggar outside of town to put your karma meter back in the blue.

A flashback in a movie is probably trying to tell you something about a character's history; a flashback in a game may be doing the same, or it may simply be putting the character back in an "easier time" so they can learn the lock-on mechanics against a scarecrow, and never reference anything plot-related again.

In video games, of course, we're hardly surprised when someone takes ten bullets in the torso and is sprinting down the beach five minutes later. In a movie, they better be a cyborg from the future if they pull that stunt, or at least reveal that they're wearing kevlar.

In a movie, we might expect a scene of characters doing important but technical, time-consuming, or dry activities (research, computer hacking, safe cracking, reading...) to be glossed over with a montage of cross-fades and maybe some voice-over and/or a cue on the score suggesting urgency. In a game, you might do the same with a minigame... Or in the case of reading (as witnessed by games like the Elder Scrolls series) you might just be expected to actually read the thing. (Go ahead. The plot will wait for you.)

Movies based on games are often hard-pressed to remind the audience of the material they're adapting, and it sometimes feels that they forget differences like this in the process. They expand on things players had no interest in knowing more about, or in ways that run counter to the expectations of long-time players. They stop and explain things with an embarrassment that highlights those things should have been cut out in the first place. They talk when we want to see more running and jumping and shooting, and run and jump and shoot when we actually want to hear more of what a familiar character would actually say in that situation. They wander between "cinematic reality" and "video game reality" to the point that we turn off our ability to be surprised, and with it, our ability to care about the proceedings.

Games based on movies often seem like they feel all the heavy lifting viz. plot and character has been done for them, so all that remains is to paste on some semi-familiar mechanics and call it a day. Rare is the game that wanders far from the plot, or offers a chance to move well-known characters in a totally different direction; even "prequels" or "side stories" often ape the action of their "inspirations" well beyond the point of "tribute". I think this actually happened more in the days of text adventures, where games like Tellarium's, based on popular works of fantasy and science fiction, could allow the players to explore familiar worlds in ways the original authors never did without breaking the game's development budget. Today, licensing is a big business, and most developers aren't going to do anything that might put off the most incurious fan of the franchise, assuming the property's oversight team would even allow them.

I think another important difficulty in adapting a video game to a movie is what kind of story you start with and what the purpose of that story was. Lets take an example of a game story and a movie story: Metal Gear Solid and Van Helsing. MGS is often ridiculed for the insane amount of dialogue and backstory that it blasts the player with with a paltry amount of action gameplay. Van Helsing is considered a brainless non-stop collection of action scenes with the actual story fitting on a napkin. But if you tally it in terms of a percentage of the time spend on action vs story, I'm willing to bet MGS still devotes a larger amount of time to action scenes than story than Van Helsing does. The most story heavy games tend to have comparitively less time spend on story and character dialogues than the most actionpacked movies do.

This is because game stories have to be designed, from the very start, to include a lot of gameplay. That's why it's a game. There need to be a lot of reasons why there's so many action scenes. And if it's a good story, those will be good reasons. Which makes it hard to take the action scenes back out of the story to make a movie about it that isn't 4 hours long and comprised entirely of action scenes.

Movie adaptations have always been bad, but the truly good ones have been great. As said previously, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Marvel Studios have been doing pretty well with The Avengers films, Batman, Prince of Persia, X men First Class, Spiderman 1+2, Ninja Turtles 1. Now your personal opinion of these movies doesn't really matter; they are fun and good movies. They have a coherent beginning middle and end. The things that set these movies apart from the other adaptation films is that they 1 stay true to the source material and 2 are just a well put together movie. Other adaptation films that we get are cash grabs and footage for trailers; they have no heart. Same is true of pretty much any adaptation from one medium to another: most of them have no soul, but the stuff that is good is done well.

- Mortal Kombat (if there was gore in it, it would have been a cult classic by now, luckily the new one will be brutal :)- Doom (very cheesy and very entertaining)- Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (people were just bitching about it because they didn't get FFVII - the movie)- Prince of Persia (it wasn't anything special but it was alright)- Resident Evil series (I didn't like the 2nd one that much but the others, especially the 1st one, are good)- Silent Hill (too much fanservice with the Pyramid Head and the nurses and things bur great visuals and atmosphere, really felt like the game)

The thing is, these movies are mostly done by people who don't even play video games and haven't even touched the source material. They just look over the plot and the cut scenes for the games and make the movie based on that.

orangeapples:Batman, Prince of Persia... Now your personal opinion of these movies doesn't really matter; they are fun and good movies.

I want to address one bit in here, then I'll move on.

Batman Begins was mediocre at best. Prince of Persia was actually bad. Having a beginning, middle, and end does not a good movie make. It makes a coherent movie, definitely, but not a GOOD one.

The ONLY reason anyone payed any attention to The Dark Knight was because of Heath Ledger's STELLAR performance. Every other performance by every other actor in that movie was somewhere between mediocre and TERRIBLE. I personally dislike Christian Bale, since he's got all the range and emotion of Liam Neeson without actually being Liam Neeson and, therefore, able to pull it off. He's the new Keeanu Reeves. But even putting that aside, Heath Ledger was the ONLY reason to see that movie.

Prince of Persia had a solid plot but failed to deliver on the acting front. It's kind of blurry, so I can't get more specific than that, but watch it again, and you'll see what I mean.

Get what I'm saying? Movies are unique in that the quality of the acting can make or break a movie, whereas a smart game can get past having bad writing or voice acting (see the original Half-Life, where the voice acting could have been done better by a high-school drama group, but the game is still a classic and well worth your time and money).

I'd say it's POSSIBLE to adapt SOME games into movies, especially the ones that insist on being "cinematic" (read: Mass Effect, Uncharted series, etc.). But even when a game seems to be perfect for adaptation to the big screen, like the one Zelda game Nintendo makes over and over (the 3d one, not the top-down one), or the first Bioshock, you're still going to have a LOT of trouble adapting it.

With a game like Zelda, you don't really realize how bloody much of the game is gameplay. I'm not just talking about the temples, which I guess would be montaged or skimmed in the film to avoid boring the audience with too many block-pushing puzzles. It's scenes like the one in Twilight Princess where you have a shootout with moblins like it's an old west movie, or the six or seven times you have to sneak into the castle as a kid without being spotted by the guards. Those parts were MADE by the interactivity that makes video games unique.

Or take a game like (the first half of the original) Bioshock. That game was a story-driven FPS, and the plot twist at the end was a brilliant critique of gaming in general--how we think we have freedom, but really we're being led by the nose by the developer. We're ignoring the subsequent plot where the ending was total shite. Anyway, that scene COULDN'T have the same impact on film as it did in-game, because you lose that metacommentary and it becomes another boring, predictable plot-twist where the guy helping you was--uh-oh!--evil all along!

I think it COULD be done, but it would take a talented writer and a LOT of effort. Which is something that won't be happening to a video-game movie any time soon.

The nail has been rather struck on the head here, though I'd argue another aspect of the situation just as important would be the inability to translate mechanics and complex ideas from one medium to another.

Take the Lord of the Rings, for instance. The story is about a long journey by a divided group all over the map. This idea, however, is done a lot better in the book because, to be perfectly frank, the book has a map. In the movies, when the party travels to Rohan, it just appears. Where is Rohan? North, South, East, West? Where is it in relation to where they are right now? The geography of Middle Earth, and what effect it has on their journey, is important to the story. Yet the movie glosses this over, leaving anyone who doesn't already know how the world fits together lost.

In the case of video games, consider a game like, say Skyward Sword. At one point, you have to embark on a tiny sidequest to get a pointless character who will carry a heavy gear to a broken machine to unlock a puzzle to reveal a shrine which you can then use to point the way to another temple where you learn a song which will let you progress with the story. In a video game, this can be pulled off, but translating this directly into the realm of film would be a nightmare.

Yahtzee Croshaw:Recently, while recording one of the horrible podcasts I do for my personal site with my horrible colleague Gabriel, he produced a copy of the novelization of the terrible movie Spider-Man 3, and posed me the question: who, exactly, is this product for?

Possibly people like me?

Hi, I'm Root, and I'm someone who desperately wants to see fictional worlds treated with respect and dignity. You may also recognise what I am fighting for from the works of Alan Moore, The House Of M and other such projects.

Comics - as an industry - is a many headed clicheophage that takes great ideas and runs it through progressively less friendly stories.Films - as an industry - takes great ideas and runs them through progressively more friendly, and stupider, stories.

Books, however, don't get looked at so closely. You could even create an adaptation of an MMO into a book - without people getting very upset about it.

Novelizations, if done properly - and by god have some of them been ruined - can be all of the mania of the comics, with the structure of a film and the deeper meaning of text: as long as you change gears.

The G.I.Joe movie-book is trash for a start - it's just the script with a couple of character insert thoughts. The Showgirls movie-book (Yes, it does exist - Yes, it's worse) completely ignores it's audience by using a 50 word sentence as it's first line.

But adaptations work at times - Shakespeare's best work is in adaptation, whether it's to the original Klingon in the holodeck, or warped into Forbidden Planet (Which is realistically just The Tempest with sci-fi tweaks).

But if you were making The Tempest into a game, would you just have Prospero in a gritty FPS remake?

I think not.

Without the tragedy, romance and comedy - it simply wouldn't work, no matter if you got Tim Schafer to Kickstart it.

Build me a game where Prospero has a Persuadotron though... And everytime he uses it, your score decreases...

The Spider-Man movies are themselves adapted from comic books, and such things are the ongoing success story of the film industry, because adapting a comic book to a film is a transformation that makes sense. It's all visual action and quick, bite-size storytelling, and seeing it all in an animated format adds what the stationary panel artwork is trying somewhat inexpertly to simulate. All it does is add to the experience of the story.

Wow, that's quite denigrating to the medium of comic books. Maybe hack comic books are only pale imitations of real movement better displayed in movies, but since we're talking about Spider Man, that probably is the case.

Great points, but I think there's an even more obviously similar, and I think superior, medium to video gaming as a storytelling medium: table top role playing. Whereas video games rely on the developer creating the world and the gamer interacting with the world and characters solely on the developer's terms, role playing is a joint world building and story telling effort between the GM and players. A good GM will take input from his player characters and use it to mold the world and adventures around the PC's, going the extra mile in terms of immersion. Video games are great tools from a standpoint of telling a story you already have planned out, but I think really organic and natural storytelling can only happen in an environment where the storyteller has to react to things they couldn't have foreseen.

Ah yes, the game-to-movie adaptation. This particular facet of entertainment needs some serious polish or to be carved out of the gem altogether.

Okay, bad metaphors aside, I agree that to date, movie adaptations of games rarely work. But I'm not sure it's for the same reason Yahtzee says they fail. It's true when you take out the interactive element of entertainment, the story and visual aspect are all that's left to hold it up. However, I think this could still be done with games being adapted to movies, but there are two problems, one of which Yahtzee in fact pointed out in his Ghostbusters review; people in the film industry they don't generally understand video games. As a result, when they try to adapt a game's content to the silver screen, they often make the mistake of thinking they need to have people behaving in the movie in such a way that parts of the game's mechanics are incorporated into it. The way "House of The Dead" and its direct-to-video sequel were handled are perfect examples of that.

The other reason is more cynical, but I suspect it's the truth: the people who have created movie adaptations for games to date don't respect their audiences. They think gamers are all so obsessed with games they don't need to make any effort to get any degree of accuracy in their film in bringing out the game's plotline; just slap the game's name on any half-assed attempt to vaguely resemble the game it's "based" on and sit back to watch the box office revenue roll in, that's their philosophy. Look at "Alone in The Dark" and all the live-action "Resident Evil" movies, they're perfect examples. In fact, since Alone in The Dark (the original trilogy and -maybe- The New Nightmare) are games I really enjoyed, I've often thought about how I'd do a movie adaptation. First off, I'd probably start with the first AiTD game, i.e. the old I-Motion one. Second, I wouldn't try to cast an actor that's supposed to come across as some kind of action movie knockoff, I'd cast someone who fits the role of a private eye; hard-edged, gruff, cynical, but smart, capable, loyal and honest. My personal pick would be Ted Levine. Third, rather than have him act exactly like the game mechanics have you act (i.e. picking up random objects and using some of them in ways that wouldn't seem logical if you didn't know what to do ahead of time, exploring every single room in the house even though any sane person would want to get the hell out of Dodge...) I'd give him some kind of sensible motivation for his actions, like he finds the front door sealed shut when he tries to leave so he goes around the house desperately trying to find a different way out, and along the way he uncovers the truth of the house.

But I digress. I think this is the primary problem of movie adaptations of games. They don't try to bring the plot, the story of the game to life per se. They make a poor attempt at creating a generic movie in whatever genre it's supposed to be (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc.) and slap the game's title on it in a cheap attempt to create a built-in amount of success. I think the day we see a GOOD movie adaptation of a game will be when film makers see a video game as an opportunity to tell a story through their medium, not as a cheap marketing gimmick.

I think that a type of Video Game to Movie translation that would work well would be movies that just take place in the same world as a game. Thus giving you the ability to create an interesting story without taking too much away from what made the original great.

Take, for example, a "Portal" movie. You could do it *if* you did not try and tell the story of Chell. One exciting/interesting movie plot I could think of would be the rise of GladOS, and her subsequent complete domination of Aperture Science.

If done correctly, this could be an excellent movie, and in no way diminish the games. Because you would just be setting the movie in the *world* of Portal, and not trying to make a movie specifically of that game, you avoid the problems Yahtzee pointed out.

Books are not immersive. They're not first person (well, not automatically), and have you seen the frame rate? Plus, I mean, seriously, they're not even real time. If you start a fight and the phone rings, you can put it down and pick back up at the same spot!

The Mass Effect books, by the way, are mostly good for a specific reason: They're written by the guy behind the first Mass Effect and seek to expand the universe. Most of the game nvoels I've read aren't like that. Most are...Horrible.

Most movies seek to abandon as much of the original plot as possible in games anyway, and most are also untrue to the characters. Even if they are cardboard, fleshing them out makes more sense than recreating them from whole cloth.

I mostly agree that comic books and film bridge well because they're very similar mediums. Both are largely visual in nature. The difference of course is that comics use static visuals and no audio, meaning that the medium needs means of conveying them through means wholly unique to itself.

I disagree that comics ineptly convey action and movement. The assertion is functionally correct, comics need things like motion likes or multiple still frames to convey the idea of movement. But this is more a limitation that many artists work to overcome, many times to great effect.

The point of course is that many traits are consistant with the two, and so stories have an easier time transfering over. There are three main reasons you get bad comic book movies:1) Trying to create a film about a comic and trying to squeeze in too much. Comic books can last for decades, so they transfer best as individual stories rather than whole francises.2) The comic in question was either ineptly made, or is horribly outdated so the film turns out unappealing outside its original context.3) The filmakers or producers or directors or actors either couldn't convey the story and tone well, or didn't care to.

Optional 4) Frank Miller directed it. The Spirit was an awful film, and much of the blame rests squarely on the guy who seriously wrote "I'm the Goddamn Batman!"

I don't completely agree with Yahtzee Croshaw on this. Yes a certain element goes a miss when you take an interactive element out of the experience however this shouldn't affect the movie IF the game has a strong story over it and or some wiggle room for a new story. Take Fallout 3 if someone made a movie portraying the events that lead up to " The Great War " you wouldn't have too many fan boys making a fuss because the war was never really depicted in the games just the after math. Or take Bioshock although it has a strict story line the story is so strong that someone could in theory make a prequel movie based on the original game from the perspective of Andrew Ryan and still make it seem like it came of the game as in terms of being loyal to the original content.

misterprickly:I think the biggest reason why game based movies suck is because the movie studios that make'em don't care about the source material as much as they do with the expected revenue they hope to make off opening day.

A few people have been saying things like this but I find it a little misleading. Movie studios like game publishers, at the higher levels at least, care about one thing: making money. Owners of the bigger IP's generally won't release the rights to their games for a variety of reasons (Nintendo made the mistake once). Then the games that Hollywood actually gets to work with, usually stuff like Blood Rayne, Alone in the Dark, Dungeon Siege, the names alone do not exactly inspire confidence of a big audience turnout that something like Transformers or GI Joe or Batman would, so they get low budgets and 3rd rate priority.

When they get a big enough game they do can do a half decent job, like Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, or Prince of Persia. And by do a good job I mean by movie standards in that they get a proper budget and attach some recognizable names to the project. But these are few and far between, and are never really big hits to begin with.

The_root_of_all_evil:Novelizations, if done properly - and by god have some of them been ruined - can be all of the mania of the comics, with the structure of a film and the deeper meaning of text: as long as you change gears.

Interesting point, and I would tend to agree. But could you name at least one novelization of an action movie that you found was a good book? I honestly fail to even imagine which one it could be.

Interesting point, and I would tend to agree. But could you name at least one novelization of an action movie that you found was a good book? I honestly fail to even imagine which one it could be.

Good books, and one's I like, often are different beasts.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is quite good (mainly because it removes the actors from the equation),[Again, it's NOT like the comic, and shouldn't be expected to be - different beast], lots of the Dr Who Novelisations are very good (Nightmare of Eden, The Claws of Axos, City of Death - because they can show without BBC's lack lustre effects), CSI/Supernatural are both good.

Often it's books based on a pre-existing era that are the best, because there's not the need for shovelling in stuff. Hellblazer, the book, is better than the film though not as visually striking. (And, again, is nothing like the comic)

Now I seem to remember that in the original writing of BttF, that Doc Brown was a much nastier figure and they had to break into a nuclear power plant to get back - but the budget wouldn't stretch, and so they quick-engineered the clock tower bit - which became it's most iconic moment.

That's why the nuclear bomb is in the novel, it's a Chekov's bomb that got written out.

While your objections are valid, the main problem this kind of thing doesn't work is because of budget and time, or more correctly that the developer has none. You try make a compelling game to match up with a date that is only a year away, and with only half the budget you asked for, based on a thing that is itself not entirely done. More success would happen if the film studios had two things happen. 1. Let the game developers start working on the game in tandem with the production of the film, let the game studio's see the production, costumes, and everything else and be able to use that, so the game isn't rushed out at the last minute 2. allow them to have much more freedom when actually making it. Most people won't care if the game follows the movie at all, only that if the game and movie share the box art and share the title.

While there is a certain amount of participation when reading a book you can't change the outcome of the story (unless it's one of those choose-your-own-adventure books). I'd say the film medium is closer to books than games are! Some games are pretty linear, the older Final Fantasy games were like picture books almost, but I reckon the future of gaming will be giving players the power to change the story.

Not all movies based on games suck; just most of them, because the writers usually make the mistake of using the same characters and plot (instead of just the setting/universe) and all the fanboys get their knickers in a bunch.

The Prince of Persia movie was pretty awesome, though - I haven't played any of the games, but I thought the movie was exceptionally well-made for a video-game-based movie.

Some people like the Tomb Raider adaptation; personally I think it sucked. I haven't seen Max Payne or Hitman or Doom, so I can't comment there. And the last few Resident Evil movies have been good as action movies.

To be honest, there's a lot more decent games based on movies than there are movies based on games.

The ONLY reason anyone payed any attention to The Dark Knight was because of Heath Ledger's STELLAR performance. Every other performance by every other actor in that movie was somewhere between mediocre and TERRIBLE.

I'm sorry, but no. Absolutely no. You're taking your personal opinion and expanding it to fit everyone else, and that's no way to make an argument. If you didn't like those movies, fine. If you thought the actors weren't good, fine. But you can't just assume everyone else thinks the same, because that's not just pure BS, but also egocentric.